Dear Master Malstrom,

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As you quoted.

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“I’m also becoming more and more concerned how no one seems to talk about gameplay anymore. Gamers talk about themselves, stream themselves, talk about how they are awesome and how others aren’t, but the love of gaming is being replaced by love of ourselves. It’s like gaming is de-evolving into a type of social media.”

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It has already happened.

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Today’s indie game scene act like there the saving grace of the industry when most the products they release are terrible and wouldn’t last a week in the arcade play floor of the past.  Today’s lets players can’t go a minute without shoving themselves in front of the camera talking about how privileged we are to watch them play video games (yeah right).  Today’s video game “commentators” can’t let us go without reminding us about them and how amazing they are (at not researching the subject they talk about).  Game journalists especially cannot review a product without talking about they’re own personal politics being bought into a GAME REVIEW.

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I just don’t honestly care about these people because its all the same.  “Me, me, me.”  I understand playing and reviewing games are from ones personal perspective, its just I don’t want to hear or read about you.  I just want to read about the core mechanics of the video game.  Its gameplay, its performance.  That’s it.  The easiest job on the planet and yet very few can do it right.  Its a crying shame too.

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When looking at streamers and online reviews, it seems like I am seeing the same exact personality. Maybe this is what happens when you spend most of your time in the entertainment world, but I would never call any streamer or online reviewer ‘salt of the earth’. From my perspective, they all seem like Austin-ites running around with crazy hats and excitedly telling everyone about a new restaurant they are eating at. For reference, I currently live, work, as well as take classes around the Houston Ship Channel. So I am in another universe.

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I don’t want to use the hipster word, but there is something… very common with the online personalities (streamer, online reviewer, or whatever). The humor is the same ‘ironical’ type. It’s hard to take them seriously. I don’t want to say they are children with adult bodies because that isn’t exactly accurate. It is the sense that there is nothing solid to these people. They have no solid value. A soldier, electrician, engineer, trucker, etc. all have a type of solidness to them. If there were such diversity with online personalities, you would see these characters appear. However, we have the opposite of solid.

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Why is this a problem? It is if you are of a different personality matrix than what is out there. I cannot relate to these online personalities. Is this some some of mutation that occurs if you invest your life in playing video games?

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This all has the smell of ‘hardcore’. I believe gaming should interact with the world, not be a world unto itself.

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I think gaming has a crisis in that so many game developers today have grown up with video games. Instead of having novel experiences with life to share and color their game making, their lives are nothing but earlier game playing. It might explain why everything feels so samey.